


Swords and Bows, Spiders and Baths

by Saentorine



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works, The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Archery, Baby Legolas Greenleaf, Bathing/Washing, Childhood, Domestic Fluff, Elf Culture & Customs, Elves, Family, Family Fluff, Father-Son Relationship, Fatherhood, Fluff, Gen, Mirkwood, Mother-Son Relationship, Motherhood, Nudity, Parent Thranduil, Parenthood, Silly, how legolas got into archery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-11 14:20:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4438760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saentorine/pseuds/Saentorine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Parenting a baby elf is tiring business . . . especially in light of sinister new residents of the forest.</p>
<p>Silly domestic fluff involving Thranduil and his wife, and baby Legolas taking a bath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swords and Bows, Spiders and Baths

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tarmetiel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tarmetiel/gifts).



> This is silly, but I was inspired by my friend's own standoff with a spider in her bathtub and she challenged me to write something about Thranduil that doesn't involve any death or sads. So here it is!
> 
> Rating T for nudity because pretty much everyone is naked at some point in this XD

Thranduil knew he was due his turn after leaving his wife alone all day with their young son. Caring for Legolas was quite a task these days. Although infant elves were uncannily graceful and well spoken, it would be several more decades before their son achieved his full height and emotional maturity—several more decades of mischief and tantrums with the intelligence, creativity, coordination, and vocabulary of an adult. Not that they would trade it for the world, but they now understood well why their kin had so few children so many years apart.

After attending to his elk, he came upon his wife and son in a clearing near the palace where an attempt at an archery lesson had clearly taken place. It had been a rainy spring and the clearing was sodden-- which might not have been issue for an adult elf firing over the expanse of dirt to the targets beyond, but in the case of Legolas had resulted in both him and his mother veritably covered in mud. Thranduil tried to imagine what must have transpired for this to have taken place, but figured he would be regaled with the story at dinner whether he wanted to hear it or not.

“It is not a sword,” his wife was sighing as Legolas was darting around poking the air-- and occasionally his mother-- with an arrow held by the fletching, his cheeks smeared with mud like war paint. She held out a bow to him, her hair two-toned with dirt.

“I told you he takes after me,” Thranduil replied, making no disguise of the teasing in his eyes as he announced his arrival. Although it was far too soon to tell, of course, they had already had numerous discussions as to whether their son would prefer sword like his father or bow like his mother. Thranduil argued that because Legolas looked most like him it was only natural he should follow in this as well; his wife that surely _something_ of hers must have been encoded in him. She was prone to trying to tip the scales in her favor and had clearly taken advantage of their day alone to coach him in her craft-- though to little avail, it seemed.

“Indeed; he is certainly as stubborn and petulant as his sire,” she agreed with a provocative lift of her eyebrows and a flash of her pale eyes. At this flirtation he approached her and wrapped a possessive arm around her waist, to which she responded by cupping his cheeks with her hands and kissing him. He felt the grime on her hands and tasted a little on her lips as well, but it did not bother him. 

However, they were interrupted when Thranduil yelped in response to a sharp prod to his rear. Flushing with indignation he snatched for his son but only succeeded in grabbing the arrow.

“You will be wanting a bath before the evening meal?” she asked him, knowing his usual habit and smirking at the muddy handprints she had left behind on his face.

“I had been hoping for one . . . ” he admitted, wiping some of the dirt away and suspecting what her next command would be. He had hoped he might be able to sneak a short one in beforehand, a little relaxation on his own before devoting his full attention to his son. After all, a hunt hardly counted as leisure time.

“Perfect. Legolas is in need of one as well.”

“And what about you?” he asked, nodding to the grit in her own hair far more noticeable than in his.

“There is no sense cleaning myself until the rest of this has been cleaned,” she sighed, indicating the chaos of poorly-strung bows and broken arrows around them. “I will join you when I finish.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go straight away and let me take care of the mess? You seem very tired.”

“Just _take him_ ,” she repeated, and so he could attempt no further argument, as Legolas dashed past she seized him under the arms and held him out to his father. There was no denying it; she had had a rough day.

Thranduil took him, holding him at arm’s length so that he did not drip mud onto his robes. However, Legolas soon rendered this tactic useless as he began to kick his legs in order to swing vigorously back and forth, singing a song about mallorn trees in Lothlórien and repeating earlier lines in place of later ones he forgot. He had trouble remembering the whole thing.

His robes properly soiled, Thranduil set him down on his feet and took his hand. “Are you going to be good for your _adar_ now, little one?” he asked him. “It sounds like you weren’t very good for your _naneth_ today.”

“I was good,” Legolas insisted. “I bested _nana_ four times.”

“Because your _naneth_ was trying to teach you archery, not swordplay. I do not believe it counts as 'besting' if you are competing with someone who is not playing the same sport."

They came to some gentle falls a short walk from the palace and Thranduil helped a yet-distracted Legolas-- now practicing his bird calls on some feathered witnesses in the surrounding trees-- remove his soiled clothes and guide him under the falling water. Legolas shrieked at the sudden shock of cold and almost bolted, but Thranduil managed to keep him still enough to scrub his scalp and rinse the mud from his hair. It wasn’t that his son minded being clean, Thranduil figured, so much as everything else was so much more interesting than the process of becoming so. He sighed wistfully trying to remember when thousands of years ago he had been young enough not to have the patience to make it through something as simple as a bath.

When Legolas was clean, he sat him on a nearby rock with an order to stay still while his father washed. A fruitless command, for the elfling was going to fidget and distract himself no matter what, but at least his father’s stern gaze stilled him for the moment, a minute longer that Thranduil could devote to his own bathing, which he intended to be a bit more ceremonial than perfunctorily washing away dirt. He opened the small sack he had brought with them containing several pots of oils pressed from nuts and leaves, a masque of bark and berries, and a long scrubbing brush of wood and boar bristles. Elves were blessed with several millennia of youthful looks, but 5000-year-old skin and hair called for diligent attentiveness.

“Why do you use that funny stick?” Legolas asked, looking up for a moment from gathering a selection from long hanging vines of several trees in the clearing to observe his father massaging his lower back with the brush.

“I cannot reach my back otherwise.”

“You could ask me to do it,” Legolas scoffed.

“ _Would_ you do it?” Thranduil asked him, turning slightly to offer access in case it was a genuine offer. It would be a blessing indeed if he could keep his son busy with something like that.

“Well, you’ve got your . . . brush thing . . . so I don’t have to, do I?” Legolas pointed out, apparently more interested in braiding the random vines together. Too much to hope for.

By the time Legolas was tugging at his vine rope with the unspoken plan to start swinging on it, Thranduil had finished, wrapping his oil-soaked hair in a cloth and piled it high on his head to soak as they rested in the hot spring-fed pool a short walk away. Pleased that they could move on to something else, Legolas bolted up and began skipping for the next stage of the bath.

“ _Not_ when you’ve just washed,” Thranduil interrupted Legolas’s beeline for a particularly deep mud puddle next to the path.

Finally, they were both in the warm pool. The water was opaque with natural salts and bubbles emanating from the springs beneath. Thranduil sighed as he sank into it, feeling his tense muscles untighten. Meanwhile Legolas submerged his nose and blew bubbles until he accidentally tasted some of the water, spitting it out in disgust.

“It has minerals in it that are good for the skin,” Thranduil explained.

He was met with a long stream of water shot from Legolas’s mouth in response, directly to his face.

“Thank you. I’m sure that will do wonders for my complexion.”

Eventually, however, the hot water seemed to calm him and both of them leaned back with their arms spread over the rocks. Thranduil even went so far as to close his eyes, listening to the evening birdsong and the rustle of trees as the night began to cool.

However, not more than a few minutes passed before Legolas was fretting again. Sighing to himself that he should have known the peace would not last, Thranduil opened his eyes to witness his son frantically flicking spiders off his arms into the water in disgust, their little black carcasses floating around him in the water.

When they were still as young as mortals, young Elves often shared mortals’ aversions to the stranger creatures of the land. Thranduil laughed. “It’s just a spider,” he assured him. “They’re more interested in other insects than you. No need to harm them when they mean you no harm.”

Pouting, Legolas pulled away from the side of the pool where no spiders could get him.

Peering along his left arm, Thranduil saw a string of them crawling along his side of the pool as well. Very strange spiders, he thought, to follow one another in a line like ants. The Greenwood hosted a plethora of spiders in myriad colors, but this solid black variety was becoming more and more common. He hoped they weren’t displacing the other types, for the forest flourished in its diversity of life. However, in the peace of the warm water under the forest canopy the thought did not distress him, and he sank deeper into the water with a blissful sigh.

However, not more than a couple minutes had passed when Legolas made another fretful noise in the back of his throat. “ _Ada_ . . . “ he started.

“What is it?” Thranduil asked, opening his eyes to see Legolas gaping wide-eyed at something apparently above his father’s head-- and for once, absolutely still.

“It’s . . . just . . . a spider,” said Legolas, unblinking.

Slowly, Thranduil turned around to see that his son was correct. Hovering over the pool was the largest spider Thranduil had ever seen—by several magnitudes. Black like the little spiders Legolas had pitched into the water-- its offspring?-- the spider was large enough to hold a man in its jaws. He almost contributed his own burst of warm minerals to the water.

“Back away _slowly_ , Legolas,” he hissed back to his son, who began scrambling up over the rocks a little too fast for Thranduil’s comfort, knowing how spiders could see the movement.

Unfortunately, his fear was well-founded. The spider lunged for the opposite side of the pool, nearly bowling Thranduil over. Thranduil’s heart lurched with terror that it would catch him and as its belly passed overhead he reached for the only weapon at hand-- his brush-- and immediately stabbed it upward into the soft tissue where the cartilage of its belly met its spindly legs. The spider hissed and made an about-face, turning away from Legolas who scampered swiftly to safety up into a tree-- but then it was Thranduil who was left vulnerable, standing stark naked in a mineral bath as the towel on his head began to tip to the left. He gave a loud whistle of distress, hoping one of his subjects with a weapon was in earshot they would come running to his aid. A king’s modesty be damned, if he was going to be found nude, he would rather it be alive than dead.

He swatted the brush out in front of him, wishing boar bristles were made of tempered steel, and delicately began backing up one careful foot behind the other, weighing his choices between hiding beneath the water long enough for his predator to lose interest-- could he even hold his breath that long?-- or fleeing to his own tree in hopes a savior would arrive before he and his son’s bodies were clothed in spider silk and hung to dry for a spider’s dinner.

Thranduil’s ears pricked up at a familiar crisp thud and whistle. An arrow flew beneath its carapace and the beast squealed in pain, falling forward and twitching. His heart lifted as another arrow struck alongside the first, and another, until the beast was dead. Gravity finally mastered his towel and it dropped off his head, splattering his oil-soaked hair against his back.

Legolas dropped from his tree and ran to his father’s side, shivering as he pressed his wet skin against his father’s leg for warmth and comfort. Exhaling in wild relief, they both followed the path of the arrows with their eyes until their gaze fell upon Legolas’s mother, hair in a thick wet braid from her own bath in the falls and her bow raised high.

Legolas’s eyes were wide. “I want to learn to do _that_ , _nana_!” he cried.

Her expression of fear and determination melted as her lips curled into a smile. “Of course you do, little one," she winked at Thranduil, knowing that although their bathing habits would need to change in light of these terrible new residents in their forest, at least her next archery lesson would be much more productive!


End file.
